by Rhys Ford
Mace just didn’t know if any of it stuck.
“Anything you say, you know it won’t change how we feel about you, right?” Luke moved over and sat closer. Mace’s thoughts flashed to another Hispanic man, his terrified face bloodied from a vicious beating, and all he could think about from that moment on was Luke curled up in an alleyway and the feel of a baseball bat clenched in his hands. “All of us here have dark places and secrets. No one can judge.”
“I can sure as hell judge,” Mace snorted.
Bear edged in and sat on the ottoman, so close his knees nearly touched Mace’s leg. “You tell us what you think you need to. And Luke is right—every single one of us has had shit to eat, served up by people who should have taken care of us. Whatever happened, whatever you’re holding on to, we’re here to listen. That’s all.”
“Speak for yourselves,” Ivo piped up and nudged Mace’s thigh with his bare foot. “I was raised by you guys. I’m golden.”
“Can’t be as bad as our mother,” Gus interjected from across the sectional, his head resting on Rey’s shoulder. “And really, we’ve all seen a lot of ugly. Pretty sure we can take it.”
The sight of his brother and his best friend sitting intertwined and attentive twisted something in Mace’s heart. He wanted what they had. He’d never given a thought to sharing his life with someone, but seeing their relationship—their solid, chaotic relationship—made Mace realize he was missing out on so much of life by trying to hold on to his heart. Breaking through the wall he’d put up between him and his brothers was only the first step to reclaiming himself. After that, there was a certain golden-eyed tattoo artist he wanted to get to know much better.
Earl’s head on his thigh did him in, but the dog’s mad scramble to get into Mace’s lap became a battle of wills and caused him a few shots of pain. The shouting was loud, but Earl was determined, and eventually everyone settled down when the shaggy mutt had gained his purchase, wedged between Mace and Ivo.
If his hands were a distraction, then the dog was a balm, and Mace soon lost himself in the texture of Earl’s fur on his fingers and the coarse hair that tickled his hand as he worked it through Earl’s rough coat.
“It all started when my mom left him, or maybe it started after she gave birth to me. I don’t know. I don’t really remember him before he took me. I knew who he was, but he wasn’t a part of my everyday life until… he became my entire life.” Mace took a breath, but it did nothing to ease the tightness in his chest. “He tried to change everything about me—my name, my thoughts, anything that my mother had given me up to that point.
“But mostly he tried to make me—turn me into—someone exactly like him.” He forced the words from his mouth. “He has ideas about race that I don’t agree with. Or at least I don’t now, but back then, everything he pounded into my head was hateful and destructive. Anyone who wasn’t our skin color—not of European descent—was nothing more than a talking animal, someone—something—to be used and subjugated.”
Luke’s hand on his knee almost undid Mace, and he had to look away. Earl shifted against him, whined slightly when Mace’s fingers stilled, and then heaved a sigh of contentment as Ivo took up where Mace left off and lightly scratched the dog’s back. With his head down and his focus on the tufts of loose hair coming out of Earl’s coat, Mace continued.
“When he first took me, I fought him. There were nights when he would throw me into the bathtub—into ice water—and then beat me until it ran pink. He would starve me and lock me in a closet and leave the apartment or the house we were at. Sometimes it was just for a few hours, but there were times when it would stretch on for days.” The memory of biting his lip to satisfy his thirst rose up and blended with the bile of his stomach as he fought to maintain control.
“The hardest thing to deal with was the silence. I couldn’t hear anything. He would duct tape the door and cover it with bubble wrap so no light would come in and no sound would reach me. Sometimes I could hear the bang of a pipe when someone turned on the water or the rattle of an air vent, but usually there was nothing there. It got so I hated the sound of my own heartbeat in my ears, and my throat would hurt because I couldn’t talk anymore. I used to talk to myself just so I wasn’t alone.
“I would tell stories. It made the darkness seem not so scary anymore.” Mace shifted to take the pressure off of his shoulder. “And it’s going to sound stupid, but if I closed my eyes when I was telling them, it was like I was making it dark and I had some sort of control over it. I could usually do that for a few hours, but if it got longer than that, my voice would give out.”
“Well that explains why your voice is so deep and raspy,” their youngest brother teased.
“Ivo, not now,” Bear scolded in a sharp rumble.
“It’s okay,” Mace said, looking up. “It helps to laugh at something sometimes. Now, it’s easier to think about it because it’s like all of that happened to someone else, to a little boy named Johnny whose father drank too much and did drugs and had his friends come over to talk about doing horrible things to other people, who did horrible things to me.
“It’s hard to remember being that little kid because, if I shove it away, I can pretend it wasn’t me, that I wasn’t the one who chewed my fingernails because I was hungry or drank my own piss because I didn’t have any water. I hear about kids that Luke sees, and all I can think is, at least that wasn’t me. I had it better.” Rubbing at his face, Mace got a piece of dog hair in his eye, and he flinched when Luke pushed his hand away to help him.
“Hold still. Let me get that,” Luke whispered, his fingers gentle on Mace’s cheek. A whisper of an accent thickened his words, and a heat rolled beneath them. Mace pulled back a little and tried to meet Luke’s gaze. Luke smiled at him and then said, “You should never think that you deserve anything less than the best. No matter what your father tried to turn you into, he didn’t succeed.”
Mace shook his head, and from across the room, both Gus and Rey objected before he spoke, their murmurs a soft admonishment against anything he was going to say.
“I helped him. There were a few times when he would take me with him, and they would go hunting Mexicans or blacks, anyone who didn’t look like them. It didn’t matter.” Mace caught himself before he could be sick and swallowed hard. Breathing through his cold sweats, he continued, “Usually men, but there were a couple of times they’d come back and say they found themselves a good time, and what does it matter, because it’s not like they were real people.
“That’s who I was when the fireman found me that day. I didn’t want to go with him because he was darker than I was, because he was a different race than me. I didn’t believe him when he said he would save me because… I guess I knew deep down inside what we were doing was wrong.” He heard Bear murmur something—a soothing sound meant to console—but Mace pushed on, needing to say the rest of what he’d built up in his head before he lost all his nerve. “I didn’t deserve to be saved. And I sure as hell didn’t deserve to be rescued by a man my father and I would beat up if we caught him alone late at night. That’s the kind of person they found.”
“Mace, you are not that person.” Luke grabbed at Mace’s hand and pulled it away from the dog. He ducked his head and forced Mace to make eye contact, but it was too much. He had to look away from Luke’s beautiful, emotional face. “When I got here, you were the first one to make me feel like I had my feet underneath me. Bear was working to make us safe and give us a home, but you were the one we fought with because you’d get us out of bed to go to school or make sure we got to whatever part-time job we were working at that month. For fuck’s sake, you made sure we got dressed up to go to Ivo’s school for that stupid art show where they put black bars over the nudes he did. That’s my brother.”
“If I had met you just a few years before, I would’ve pounded your face in,” Mace confessed through a veil of tears and the thick gravel in his throat. “Don’t you understand that? I would’ve been o
ne of those guys you work to get your kids away from. I enjoyed it. I used to look forward to the closet door opening up so I could be let outside, and the price I paid for every single one of those nights was someone else’s blood. The first time, I bashed some guy who looked a lot like you. We nearly beat him to death. Hell, for all I know, he died. I was a kid. Sure, I can use that as an excuse, but that doesn’t wash the blood off of my hands. It doesn’t make it okay that I got excited to go with my father and his friends on those nights.”
“You know what pisses me off the most?” Gus called out from across the room. Untangling himself from Rey’s embrace, Gus stood up and worked his way around the ottoman toward the open space in front of the television. “All of the fucking times I give you shit about needing to leave the light on or having the stereo playing, like you were a little kid who was scared to go to bed at night, and all you had to do was tell us about this crap. All this time I went around thinking you were an asshole because, no matter how much I needed quiet, you made sure there was all this noise.”
“Don’t make this about you, babe.” Rey moved to get up, but Bear’s hand was on his shoulder before he could do more than lean forward.
“It’s not about me. It’s about this fucking asshole pushing us every single goddamned day to be better—just like his father pushed him to be a monster—and we would curse him out. Nearly every night the three of us would bitch the fuck about how much Mace pissed us off that day, and never once did he think maybe we needed to understand where the hell he was coming from.” Gus turned and faced Mace with a snarl. “I fucking hate you as much as I love you, because nothing I did was ever good enough. And what you’re telling me right now is that you were that much of a fucking asshole, not because I wasn’t good enough, but because you thought you weren’t. And that’s a big fucking bullshit, because the first thing we all swore to each other was, no matter what the fuck happened to us, we would stick together. Right?”
“How did that go? Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us?” Ivo’s words dug beneath Mace’s skin. Pushing his riot of pastel hair away from his face, Ivo smirked. “Wasn’t that the point of this family? I mean, I came to this really late in the game, and anything I did or that was done to me—with the exception of Puck, because yeah, I knew he tried to kill me—but everything else is pretty low-key. All of my drama and shit is nothing compared to you guys, but the deal was no matter what happened, we held on.”
“And that’s what we’re going to do right now, hold on to him.” Bear nudged Earl off of the couch. The dog grumbled but shuffled off, and then Bear shifted closer until his knees nearly touched the couch and forced Mace’s legs to either side. Bear’s hands were enormous. When he reached for Mace’s face, Mace almost recoiled from the heat and strength in Bear’s touch. “I would hug you, but you’ve been shot, and right now I think you’re just wrung out. You’re carrying a lot of stuff you don’t have to carry alone, little brother. I knew about the guys you had sex with because you thought it kept you safe. Not the only one who did that. A lot of the kids who were in fucked-up places did what they could to survive.
“And that’s what you were doing. You were surviving. Every time he opened that closet door, you were living another day. I’m angry you had to make the choice between your suffering and someone else’s. That’s not anything a kid should ever have to choose. It’s nothing anyone should ever have to endure, but you did.” Bear glanced back and tracked Gus’s pacing. Then he shifted over to Ivo, who got a small smile. “I left you here to raise these three. Sure, I was around, but a lot of it fell to you because I was working so many hours. And you didn’t let the family down. None of us would be where we are if it weren’t for the sacrifices you made. You could’ve walked away.”
“Hell, people were probably betting on it, and no one would’ve blamed you.” Luke chortled. “We were such a damned mess.”
“Not me.” Ivo preened. “I am a fucking delight.”
“You just keep thinking that, bucko,” Gus snorted. “I’m surprised Rey didn’t kill you, and he’s the most easygoing guy we know.”
“Don’t drag me into this.” Rey shook his head, but a small grin crept over his face. “You pulled me out of a fire, Mace. Remember? I owe you my life. You gave me a passion and a career and eventually a husband who came with a kid so I don’t have to work so hard to get him pregnant.”
“We would all appreciate if you guys didn’t work so hard on that,” Ivo shot back.
“The point of this is, you have to let us carry some of the weight.” Bear took back the conversation and eased the focus back onto Mace. “The sick things he made you do were not your fault. He waged a campaign of emotional terrorism on you, and you were just a kid. I look at everything you fought to become, and I’m proud to call you brother.”
“We all are.” Luke’s words were soft and nearly a whisper. His gaze at Gus, however, was quite sharp. “All of us, right?”
With Bear’s hands still cupping his face, Mace couldn’t look away, so he caught every inch of remorse and apologetic embarrassment on Gus’s face. Gus nodded and mumbled, “I was just pissed off he didn’t trust us with everything. I mean, everyone knows about what my mother did to me and Puck, and all this time we’ve been not talking about what Puck did to Ivo to protect him, but apparently that’s gone to shit because he knows. Luke’s life was a shitstorm, but he’s the best of us. And everything shitty that’s happened to Bear was pretty much inheriting all of us. So why did you think we’d just throw you away? That’s gotta be the stupidest fucking thing that’s ever gone through your head, dude.”
“Inheriting all of you—as you put it—were the best moments of my life,” Bear corrected him. He dropped his hands to Mace’s thighs and squeezed gently. “Nothing is going to break us apart. We’re family. You’re my brother. All of you are. And I think I can speak for all of us when I say we would die for each other, and we would rather die than turn one of us away. And that includes Rey.”
“Not me.” Gus shook his head when everyone turned to look at him. “About the Rey part. I don’t think about him as a brother. Just so we’re clear on that. All of you—especially you, Mace the asshole—can love him like a brother all you want. Me? I’ve got other things on the agenda.”
“And once again Gus takes it back to himself,” Ivo sighed.
Luke clasped both his hands around Mace’s and squeezed as he rested his forehead on Mace’s temple. The air around them was growing warm from their body heat, and it was stifling, but at the same time, the tightness Mace held in his chest released and opened a space for his heart to begin beating again.
“Thanks” was all Mace could choke out. The dog whined at his feet and crept into the tight space between their legs, the sectional, and the enormous ottoman. “Yeah, you too, Earl.”
“I love you a lot. We all do,” Luke whispered. “And just so you know, blood washes off your hands pretty easily if you use water and soap. It worked for me, so I know it’ll work for you.”
THE BED wasn’t uncomfortable, but Mace felt every fluffy pillow-top mound on the mattress beneath the squillion-thread-count fitted sheets Luke liked to sleep on. He’d tried to make it up to his own bedroom, but climbing the uneven stairs with only one arm was difficult, especially when the medication made him a bit drowsy. After the second bump of his shoulder on the stairwell, Mace’s sleeping accommodations moved to the former front parlor that Luke had taken over for his bedroom years before.
It was odd how the room smelled like Luke despite him not being there all the time—a slight hint of citrus and Ivory soap. Unlike Gus and Ivo, Luke preferred things to be neat. His furniture was nearly spartan, and the four short bookshelves he’d lined up under the street-facing windows boasted a mixture of fiction, nonfiction, and textbooks nearly as wide as Mace’s head. The walls were a silvery sage in the sparse glow from the lamp on the nightstand, and despite the softness of the bed, Mace drowsed, lulled by the sound o
f the light rain outside.
When his phone rang, Mace jerked awake and badly twisted his shoulder when he tried to sit up. The covers wouldn’t seem to give him up, and “Polk Salad Annie” growled through the room at a volume loud enough to wake the dead. He gave it about three seconds before one of the guys beat at the floor above him.
“No, that’s right. Bear’s room’s above me,” Mace muttered when he worked out the layout in his head. He grabbed the phone. “He’d come down and yell at me. Hello?”
“Hey. You still mostly awake?” Rob’s sultry voice reached out and stroked at the simmering want Mace had for him. “I know it’s late, but I wanted to make sure you were okay. I got your message earlier, but the shop today was really busy, and the guys were a little bit weird. I figured I’d call you when I got home.”
“Weird how?” Mace sat up, but agony bloomed in his shoulder and then worked down to seize his spine. Grunting, he forced himself to get at least partially upright and leaned against the slightly cold wooden headboard, grateful for its chilly surface. “Anybody say anything to you? Did they give you a hard time? Because if they did—”
“No, it wasn’t like that. It was more like everybody had gone a few rounds and then came into work. It was weird because Ivo was nice. Most of the time he’s chewing on my ass about one thing or another, a hell of a lot worse than Bear, who should be giving me shit because he’s, like, the head guy. Well, that was stupid. You know he’s that guy.” Rob chuckled. “I was kind of surprised to see Gus here for the whole day. Like I said, it was just weird. How are you doing?”
“I’m doing okay.” Mace almost shrugged, but he caught himself. “Tired. And I keep doing really dumb things like reaching for things with the wrong hand or calling Earl up to the couch. And before you ask, I talked to them today. Or at least a little bit of it. Enough so that they understood how I feel inside.”